April 22, 2018 – “Wonderfully Made for an Amazing Purpose: Leading” by Rev. Cody Sandahl
Lay Reader = John 13:12-15
12After he had washed their feet, had put on his robe, and had returned to the table, he said to them, “Do you know what I have done to you?13You call me Teacher and Lord—and you are right, for that is what I am.14So if I, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another’s feet. 15For I have set you an example, that you also should do as I have done to you.
Introduction
We are FINALLY starting our sermon series looking at spiritual gifts! I say “finally” because I have been preparing for this and my spiritual gifts class that starts next week for about a year. As I was doing my early studies, the group I was learning from kept mentioning this professor as the source of their material. So I went so far as to track down the seminary course material from this Pentecostal professor over 30 years ago – took me two months of searching!
And now, after a year of prep, after greatly deepening my own understanding of how God has designed us and how the Holy Spirit works in and through us, there’s one thing repeating in my head over and over again. It’s a Seinfeld episode.
In this episode Seinfeld wakes up in the night with a great joke for his stand-up comedy routine. So he excitedly writes it down and goes back to sleep. But in the morning he can’t read his handwriting. Over the course of the episode he keeps trying to remember this great joke. And finally at the very end it comes back to him. And his face changes as he says, “That’s not funny.”
I am really hoping that a year of prep and all of my excitement for this series doesn’t result in a let-down. I just want to get that out there. I’m really hoping this isn’t a Casey at the Bat, striking out in Mudville moment.
But with that out there, let’s start by figuring out what we mean by spiritual gifts. After all, James 1 says, “every good and perfect gift is from above.” So everything is a gift from God. You know, I had a wonderful hand-made pizza at GraceFull Café this last week – that good experience was a gift from God according to James 1. But you’re not going to see pizza-making OR pizza-eating (unfortunately) on the list of spiritual gifts. We’re not talking about the general gifts we receive from God, we’re talking about spiritual gifts.
Also, I’ve taken spiritual gift assessments before that told me I have spiritual gifts like technical ability and carpentry and singing. Those are definitely talents and skills, and I received those as gifts from God – I didn’t choose how much or how little technical ability I have. But we’re not talking about our talents and skills – even though those are gifts from God – we’re talking about spiritual gifts.
To help clear up the confusion, in our staff meetings we started calling it Spiritual DNA. I think that’s closer to what we’re talking about. Your Spiritual DNA. God has designed every follower of Jesus to have impact and enjoy certain types of ministry roles. This comes from Romans 12. In fact, let’s turn to the front of your bulletin and read this text together aloud.
Romans 12:6-8 (unison)
6We have gifts that differ according to the grace given to us: prophecy, in proportion to faith; 7ministry, in ministering; the teacher, in teaching;8the exhorter, in exhortation; the giver, in generosity; the leader, in diligence; the compassionate, in cheerfulness.
What Are Spiritual Gifts?
So notice a few things about these spiritual gifts or your spiritual DNA. One – it is a gift. It comes from God rather than your choice. One staff member took the spiritual gift assessment we have on our website and said, “But I don’t want that as my spiritual gift!” Just like our physical DNA, we don’t get to choose our spiritual DNA.
Also, notice that every person is given a different mix of spiritual DNA. Not everyone has the gift of diligent leadership. Not everyone has cheerful compassion. Not everyone has the DNA to encourage. Not everyone has the DNA to teach. Every person here has a different mix of spiritual DNA.
For instance, the top three in my spiritual DNA are leading, teaching, and giving. Mercy and compassion – not in my top three. That’s why I wanted to go to a church that had someone with those gifts already on staff. Carol has a different spiritual DNA than I do, and that helps us have impact in and enjoy our different ministries here in the same church. And when we are both operating from our top spiritual DNA, the CHURCH is better off!
Finally, notice that these spiritual gifts, your spiritual DNA, they’re meant to be used in a ministry. Spiritual gifts aren’t paperweights. They’re more life golf carts – necessary and fun if you have a reason to use them but otherwise just taking up space in your garage. As a side note, I have a story about me and a flux welder and a golf cart, but that’s for another time.
So the goal of this sermon series, and the spiritual gifts class, is to help you discover your spiritual golf cart and find interesting places to drive it. We passed out descriptions of each of these types of spiritual DNA on your way in – that’s the extra info that applies to this WHOLE sermon series, so don’t toss that in the blue bin tonight!
My hope is that everyone in the church takes the spiritual gift assessment on our website – fpcl.org/gifts – it’s listed in that booklet you got – or ask Elinor in the church office for a printed copy that you can fill out and return to her for your results. Then this sermon series and that booklet will give you more info on how to drive your spiritual golf cart or use your spiritual DNA. Make sense?
And if you want a LOT of different ways to look at it, come to the class at 9:30 starting next Sunday downstairs.
In fact, last week if you were at our congregational meeting you heard several key places we are looking for people with the right spiritual gifts to step up. It’s interesting timing to need to make that ask right as we head into this sermon series on your spiritual DNA. I hope and encourage and challenge EVERY SINGLE PERSON here to pray this week. Pray EVERY DAY that God would raise up the right people to engage in those ministries. I’m serious – if this whole church prays every day this week for God to raise up the right people for those key ministries, I’ll be interested to see what the Holy Spirit does in our midst. You may not be the right person for those ministries, but you can definitely pray for God to raise up that right person. Please do that this week. If you do that, you can tune out the rest of this sermon and I’ll still be happy. Well, maybe not happy – I’ll call that a deal instead.
But now that you know what we’re talking about…we can finally get to our first spiritual gift – our first type of spiritual DNA: leading.
I’ve defined leading as “the spiritual DNA to plan, organize, and direct ministries to implement the Lord’s will.” (REPEAT)
So if we’re implementing the Lord’s will, we should probably take a look at how Jesus himself led his followers.
Mark 10:42-45
42So Jesus called them and said to them, “You know that among the Gentiles those whom they recognize as their rulers lord it over them, and their great ones are tyrants over them. 43But it is not so among you; but whoever wishes to become great among you must be your servant, 44and whoever wishes to be first among you must be slave of all. 45For the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life a ransom for many.”
Servant Leader
Well I walked into the room, saw the look on everyone’s face, and I wondered, “Is my fly down? Did I forget to put on deodorant?” Ever had one of those moments?
I couldn’t figure it out. After all, my team had just hit a home run. We had spent over a year on this spiritual mentoring project. We developed an insightful and deep approach to helping spiritual leaders grow in faith and maturity. We had convinced the whole church to buy in. We had twenty-six people agree to a full year of intensive 1-on-1 mentoring. The head pastor had just given a sermon about the project. Everyone was excited. We were getting praise left and right. What was wrong?
After the meeting, I had to ask my co-worker what I was missing. He was a real partner in ministry, willing to be brutally honest. That kind of person is worth their weight in maple syrup as a leader. And yes in case you’re wondering, some kinds of maple syrup are more valuable than gold per ounce. This man wasn’t just worth his weight in gold – he was maple syrup material.
So he let me in on the inside scoop. “The problem,” he said, “is that everyone is actually congratulating you and praising you and impressed with you. And you’re not reminding them that this team spent a year developing this.”
And so I fired him.
Just kidding! That was one of the most valuable things I could have heard as a young leader. That was maple syrup.
In our text today, Jesus says that what I did was what people expected of leaders and rulers – they are in it to get the praise and power for themselves. But Jesus wasn’t like that. And he didn’t want his followers to be like that. He said a Christ-like leader is more like a slave than a king. More like a toilet-scrubber than a crown-wearer.
A Christ-like leader must be a servant first and foremost. There are other kinds of leadership. But the spiritual DNA for leading like Christ means eating last rather than first. It means giving away credit even for your own contributions rather than hoarding the credit for the contributions of others. It means placing others first. And it means pursuing the will of God, not our own will. Even if, like Jesus, that costs us personally.
That’s a very different kind of leadership.
Probably one of my best leadership moments in my past church was when I came to visit our middle school program that included a full sit-down meal for 50 middle schoolers and their adult leaders. It was just as serene and calm and under control as you might expect.
But this day one of their volunteers had called in sick and the mashed potatoes weren’t going well. They needed someone with strength or youth or more enthusiasm than sense to stir the mashed potatoes while they cooked. So I rolled up the sleeves on my dress shirt and jumped in. That was better servant leadership than the splashy mentoring program.
So Jesus says that someone using their spiritual DNA for leading doesn’t ask about the privileges of being the leader. They ask about their responsibilities toward those they’ll be leading. Someone using their spiritual DNA for leading doesn’t say, “I finally get to put my stamp on this!” They ask “what does God want to do with this?”
Encouragement Through Obstacles
So someone with the spiritual DNA for leading plans, organizes, and directs ministries to implement the Lord’s will, and they do that with the heart of a mashed-potato-stirring servant, not a glory hoarder. What if that’s you? What then? If you already know you’re a leader, or if you go take our assessment online or grab a printed one from the office and you see the Leading is one of your top three…what then?
Well first I would love to talk to you, because I have a ton of ideas waiting for a leader to have passion and take it on! Or maybe you have a great idea I haven’t thought of.
But also, let me give you some encouragement in using your spiritual gift. And I’ll use one of my favorite topics to do it: space – the final frontier! Actually Elinor brought this as her devotional to our staff meeting and it happened to match this sermon exactly.
Pioneer 10 was a space probe launched in 1972 with a bold mission – to be the first probe to pass through the asteroid belt and do a flyby of Jupiter to gather pictures and other readings.
But that asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter was a big worry. Have you ever seen a movie where ships are flying through an asteroid belt? There are rocks smashing into each other threatening to unceremoniously dismantle any who dare enter. And astronomers knew there were a few really big rocks out there, but they were worried that there were a bunch of smaller ones they couldn’t see that would tear Pioneer 10 apart.
But they were bold enough to launch and pray. Now that we’ve been through the asteroid belt a few times, let me tell you what we’ve learned. The average distance between asteroids in the movies is just big enough for the heroes to fit their spaceship through. In our real asteroid belt, the average distance between asteroids is 600,000 miles – 2.5 times the distance between the earth and the moon. That’s a little easier to fly through. And how often do they collide? We have no clue – because it almost never happens anymore.
That giant asteroid belt problem turned out to be a totally different problem. Instead of worrying about running into a stray asteroid, now we have to carefully calculate trajectories if we want to even get close to an asteroid to study it. It was a total non-issue.
So my first encouragement courtesy of Pioneer 10 is that the problem that seems like a showstopper today may turn out to have earth-sized holes to let you through once you get closer. Don’t let the magnitude of the problem stop you.
Encouragement to Let God Use You
So Pioneer 10 obviously made it through the asteroid belt. It made history at Jupiter. It zoomed past Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto. And it kept on transmitting until the year 2003 – 31 years after it was launched on its 3-year mission. And from six billion miles away, Pioneer 10 was able to send us data on the outer solar system using nothing but an 8 watt transmitter. If you remember incandescent bulbs, the most common ones were 60 watts. I looked at an LED bulb at Home Depot this week – it used 8.5 watts. So this space probe was using less than one LED lightbulb of power to send information from 6 billion miles away.
The head of NASA’s solar system exploration division said of Pioneer 10, “It ranks among the most historic as well as the most scientifically rich exploration missions ever undertaken.” And it did it on 8 watts. That’s nothing. For reference, that’s the same amount of power burned by riding a bicycle for about 2.5 minutes.
My second encouragement courtesy of Pioneer 10 is that you don’t need to be a high-wattage leader to make an historic impact. You might only have 2.5 minutes worth of leadership wattage, but if you keep at it, and keep at it, and keep at it, you’ll find that you’ve gone pretty far.
The Bible is littered with people who didn’t think they had enough leadership wattage to get the job done, and God used them to do miraculous things. Moses was first and foremost among the “I don’t have what it takes” people in the Bible, and I bet you’ve heard of what God did through him. God can use even your 8 watts of spiritual leadership DNA.
We’ve been studying Zechariah for the last few weeks in my Men’s Bible Study, and there’s a part in there that says “do not despise the day of small beginnings.” God can use what he’s given you.
Summary
Sisters and brothers, all of us have been given spiritual gifts – spiritual DNA – ways God has designed us to be effective and enjoy certain ministry roles. Some of us have been given the spiritual DNA for leading. This sermon was for you. If that’s you, don’t let asteroid belts or your measly 8 watts stop you from planning and organizing and leading a ministry to get us closer to the will of God.
But I hope EVERYONE here will pray EVERY DAY this week that God would raise up the leaders this church needs to continue to see the amazing ways the Holy Spirit has been at work in our midst over the last few months. Amen.
